Leon Panetta hits Obama on shutdown

Former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta had harsh words for everyone in Washington — including his former boss, President Barack Obama — urging them to come to the table to end the government shutdown and reach a deal on the debt ceiling.

At a Wall Street Journal breakfast on Monday, Panetta spread the blame for the situation across the parties.

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“When you are operating by crisis, I think there’s enough blame to go around,” Panetta said, according to The Wall Street Journal. “Everybody has to engage, and engage – as I said – on the basis of trust. This town has gotten a lot meaner in the last few years.”

Panetta said even if the president believes Republicans have been impossible to negotiate with, he should still stay at it, including appointing someone to negotiate in his place, if that’s what it takes.

“You can’t, just because you’ve engaged in some set of negotiations and they haven’t gone anywhere, for one reason or another there’s been a breakdown, [that] is no reason to walk away from the table,” Panetta said. “If the president, for whatever reason, feels he can’t do it because the Republicans don’t want to confront him, then he ought to be willing to delegate that responsibility to someone who can do it.”

Panetta also blamed “extreme members of the House” who decided “to take out their vengeance on the American people and hurt their fellow citizens” because they did not get their way on Obamacare.

The longtime Washington insider said the solution will have to come through a conference on the budget and “tough choices” by both sides.

“I don’t think they ought to try to come up with some razzle-dazzle super-committee or group of muckity-mucks from the outside world,” he said. “That hasn’t worked. They are going to have to do it in the context of the conference of the budget.”

Panetta, who served as OMB director and chief of staff to former President Bill Clinton, said during the 1995-1996 shutdown, Clinton handled the situation differently.

“We were negotiating up to the last minute in the Oval Office,” Panetta said, describing a scene with all the congressional leaders huddled with the president and vice president, according to The Washington Post. “Some of us were nervous that Bill Clinton was bending over backwards to try to see if he could get a deal.”